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Ads, ad blockers and a totally awesome discovery
August 24, 2016
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| 3D modeling, Design

I include Google ads in this site to generate some income from my project work and the effort of documenting it.  Now, many of you are probably running ad blocking software in your web browsers – I certainly do, so I don’t blame you if you do. However I learned something important tonight: Google can sometimes serve up some freaking awesome ads! I am still working on eliminating the personal dating ads (I have managed to kill the awful…

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The Midnight Clock – 1
August 24, 2016
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| Design, Science & hacking

I love sleep. I really love a good long sleep and waking feeling well rested. It’s not the easiest thing to do though these days. Our lives are so busy, there are so many demands and temptations to stay up late and get up early. As the Bon Jovi song goes: “Until I’m six feet under / Baby I don’t need a bed / Gonna live while I’m alive / I’ll sleep when I’m dead…” I love staying up…

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Motorcycle helmet HUD – 3
August 22, 2016
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| 3D printing, Design, Electronics, Microcontrollers

I may still be waiting for my 3D printer to arrive, but in the mean time, the components for my HUD were waiting in the mail box today! It included a Rasberry Pi model 3 B, an Adafruit Feather Bluefruit (bluetooth enabled Feather development board) and some headers for the Bluefruit. So now I’m ready to push forward with this project and get the electronics finalised.  Once the 3D printer arrives, then I can start working on housings for…

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The Howto Howto
August 15, 2016
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| Photography, Video

Over a couple of decades the distilled wisdom of my family’s experience of hosting Christmas for our relatives has been collected in a notebook that has become known as The Christmas Book. It contains pearls of wisdom like: “Light the kettle BBQ at 8.15am for turkey to start cooking at 9.00am, for 1.00pm lunch” (yes, we usually have a monster turkey (boned and rolled and stuffed with a few boned and rolled chickens, and the thing takes at least…

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Fuel level sender unit examination
August 13, 2016
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| Electronics, Science & hacking

The fuel light on my motorcycle (a Triumph Dayton 955i) came on recently and steadfastly refused to go off, even with a full tank of fuel. My mechanic swapped it out for a new unit and gave me the old one to play with.  I have often wondered exactly how a fuel sender unit works, so I took it apart and investigated.

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Motorcycle land speed record attempt
August 12, 2016
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| Design, Engineering, General
Triumph Infor Rocket

There is something about Englishmen and going REALLY fast.  They seem to be very good at it.  Both the engineering involved in building land speed record cars and driving them. The current land speed record is held by Andy Green, driving the ThrustSSC (that’s: SuperSonic Car) and yes, ThrustSSC did break the sound barrier on land on four wheels with an average speed over one mile in two passes of 1227.986 km/h.  Any way you look at it, that’s insanely…

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Fast Internet access is here at last
August 12, 2016
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| General

I was notified yesterdaty that fiber optic Internet access has been connected to my building.  It’s not especially relevant to TtM&D, but it will definitely make web browsing for research as well well as uploading large files much, much faster!  I am very much looking forward to getting off the horribly slow ADSL2 connection that I have currently.

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Posted in General Comments Off on Fast Internet access is here at last
Motorcycle helmet HUD – 2
August 12, 2016
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| Design, Electronics, Microcontrollers

Ok, today has been an interesting day for discoveries.  I was thinking about the limitations of having to have a wired connection between the helmet and main unit on the bike and it got me thinking about Bluetooth and wireless options. The first thing I discovered (which I wasn’t aware of) is that basic Bluetooth modules (and slave and master pair) can be readily inserted in place of a serial connection between devices.  Unfortunately I don’t think that this…

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Invisible IR spotlight
August 7, 2016
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| Design, Electronics, Featured, Wood working

Another old project that I recently dug up and want to complete is this REALLY powerful invisible infrared spotlight. I chose 940 nanometer infrared LEDs for the job as they are completely invisible to the naked eye.  I should insert a WARNING here: If you are thinking of replicating this project, you need to be aware that it is uncertain if very powerful IR light like this can damage the retina in the eyes of humans and animals.  Therefore,…

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Motorcycle helmet HUD – 1
August 7, 2016
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| Design, Electronics

This is an old project that I am finally getting back to, with the hope of completing. I have ridden motorcycles for nearly twenty years, and being tall (6’2″) means that on all of the bikes that I have owned, the instrument cluster is out of my line of site – usually obscured by the chin guard of my helmet (and there is absolutely no way known that I will ever wear an open face helmet). This is a…

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